Migrating to a new server with newer, fewer disks

[agressiv]

Hey guys -

 

My unraid server died last night (guessing power supply - won't turn on anymore, motherboard gets a light - server is old and needed to go anyways).

 

Oddly, I had just started getting parts for a newer server with larger, fewer drives.  I got the old server up and running on older hardware with drives laying on a table - it's nothing I want to keep long term, but at least I'm up and running with no data loss.

 

* The old server has eight 3TB drives.

* The new server has four 10TB drives.  It only has room for four drives, so I can't physically move the old drives over.

 

Here's how I look at my options:

* Replace 4 of the 3TB drives with the 10TB, which includes the parity, one at a time.  Migrate all data from the other 4 disks manually.  Run the "clear drives" script and move 4 disks + USB to new server.

* Set up a new Unraid server, figure out a way to migrate all of my custom settings + docker configs (Plex etc) and contact unraid to transfer my license after using rsync to copy all of the data.  (Is there a native way to do this?)

 

Trying to pick what sucks the least and is the least risky.

 

Thanks for any insight!

[JonathanM]

8 minutes ago, agressiv said:

It only has room for four drives, so I can't physically move the old drives over.

You can, just not all at once.

 

My proposal, which is one of MANY ways to do this, is...

Physically build out new server with only 3 of the 4 10TB drives. Capacity at that point, 20TB. Total possible capacity for 8 3TB drives is 21TB, assuming single parity. So, unless you packed all existing drives completely full, you should have room to copy all the existing drives.

Use your existing USB boot drive, it will complain about things missing off the drives, but we'll correct that when we copy the content from the old drives.

 

Questions, which will determine the best way to copy things...

Did the old server have a cache drive? Where are your docker configs located?

[KC]

As Jon has said - there are a lot of ways to do this.

However I'd like to say what I did and how I did it. This was going from 1.5 tb drives to 3tb drives - so it's old info, take it with a grain of salt (and it's been like 6 years)

New server, new drives. Ran PreClear on all new drives. 3x Read/Write - basically ensuring the new drives are good.

I then did a unraid format / import on all disks.

Once all disks passed that I then inserted one of the old disks at a time, copying them to whichever drive I wanted. I did this via SSH/Telnet via MidnightCommander.

After all disks (in my case it was 8) I did a rebuild array. (which IIRC rebuilds parity based on the data disks info)

I have since added a 2nd parity drive - and all seems well.

YMMV - but that's what I did.

And a side note - get another drive for dual parity. It's well worth it.
One thing to keep in mind - if you do it this way all of your data is unprotected until it's finished - it's dangerous.

Edited July 18, 2019 by KC